Christopher Columbus once ordered the simultaneous burning alive of a hundred Native American tribal leaders. The historian who mentioned this in a History Channel program awhile back tried to soften the shock of it by noting that “the fifteenth century was a barbaric age.”

There was a time when I would have shuddered and changed channels. Later on, I would have been comforted to know that people dying in pain are soon out of their bodies so their actual suffering is limited. Now, though, I hear about the burning of Native Americans by Christopher Columbus and I wonder whether it might be our fault.

The afterlife evidence tells us that reality is very different from what we perceive. Our senses and our prejudices lie to us, and we comfort ourselves by trusting a modern science that is equally senses-driven and prejudice-prone. In contravention of everything that mainstream science and your lying eyes tell you, here is what the afterlife evidence now tells us:

1)     Time is subjective, and it is not linear. If things are happening at all, then they are happening all at once.

2)    Matter and energy, time and space are holographic, which means that each unit (however you may measure it) contains all the information of every other unit.

3)     Matter and energy, time and space are mind-created. Universal Mind is their foundation, and each of us is an undivided snippet of that universal Mind. Another hologram. So our minds are more powerful than we can imagine.

4)    Mind-energy tremendously affects what we see as reality. Think of a horror movie in which when a hate-crazed actor arrives the castle starts to crumble, the peasants sicken, the grass withers and the skies cloud over. But then our loving hero comes back and that castle crisply reassembles itself, the peasants and grass recover, and the sun shines bright. Try to realize that this is something like the effect that our minds apparently have on our surroundings.

5)    All our lifetimes are happening simultaneously. Something like reincarnation does seem to happen, but it happens outside of time. More advanced beings tell us that as each of us makes or avoids making spiritual progress in this lifetime, we affect for good or ill all our other lives, past and future.

Please read this list again. Then multiply by every person on earth that insight that whatever we do in this lifetime affects every one of our past lives.

Temporarily trapped in this illusion as we are, we cannot really grasp what all of this means. But one thing that it may well mean is that we are not just the product of our history. We also may be the co-creators of it.

This puzzle has been on my mind for years, ever since I first began to wrestle with the time dilemma. The possibility that our modern evils are creating or worsening evils long past is both appalling and hard to grasp. But there seems to be no way out of it. The evidence is abundant, consistent, and incontrovertible to anyone with an open mind.

Imagine how all of this might be working. Stalin and Hitler, racial lynchings, and all the many evils of the twentieth century could have worsened the history that came before, created Biblical stonings and Medieval wars, perhaps turned Christopher Columbus’s capture of a few Native chieftains and sternly lecturing them into his burning one or two at the stake. And then ten.  And then a hundred. We would be none the wiser.

Now imagine that in this new century we begin to practice love and forgiveness within families, house to house, street to street, and then over all the earth. And gradually – imperceptibly at first – the world’s bloody history turns back to peaceful. Every book on every shelf in every library on earth records an ever gentler past, until all that evil never happened at all. 

It has long been thought that as modern humans migrated out of Africa, they conquered and destroyed the Neanderthal peoples that then inhabited what is now Europe. It turns out, though, that what they actually did was to assimilate Neanderthals as they moved north, so now everyone with European ancestry has Neanderthal genetic material.

This wonderful picture was taken at the Neanderthal museum in Germany. It’s from a recent article that suggests that as much as 20% of the Neanderthal genome survives in modern humans.

It turns out that our earliest human ancestors made love, not war.

But somewhere along the way becoming “more civilized” seemed to be a good idea. We began the ongoing distortion of our own essentially loving natures that led erelong to the climactic evils of a cruel and bloody twentieth century. Now contemplate a hundred Native Americans screaming together as they burn, and the notion that their suffering could be the fruit of humankind’s later history. If you don’t want to learn to love and forgive perfectly for your own sake, then think about the possibility that you might be doing it for them.

Part of the fun of doing afterlife research is the fact that as you put together many hundreds of afterlife communications received over nearly two centuries, you find that the dead are telling us remarkable things about the structure of reality itself.

The dead tell us that reality is energy-based. There is pretty strong evidence now that nothing is solid. As the great physicist, astronomer and mathematician Sir James Jeans once said, “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” All the levels of energy-based reality – including this one – exist in the same place, and they are separated from one another only by their different rates of vibration. So far, so good. The channels of your television set all exist in the same place as well, and that analogy makes it easier for us to imagine what actually happens at death. The dead tell us that when you die your mind will simply raise its own rate of vibration from this level of reality to the next, very much as you might change television channels, and there it will pick up a whole new solid reality! Dying is just that simple.

What seems to be even harder for most of us to grasp than the fact that there is no solid matter is the apparent fact that time and space also are subjective illusions. We are so dependent on the notion that space is spacious! In fact, with nothing beyond it, space is both infinite and tiny. Size is not one of its characteristics. We think it must be large because these temporary bodies that we believe we now occupy are infinitesimal in relation to it, but the dead tell us that they can travel instantly by mind across the entire universe.

And time is apparently also nothing like the arrow that we imagine it to be. Time is subjective, mind-created, and non-linear. As Albert Einstein said, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” He also said, “The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

To further boggle your mind about time, I should add that there is considerable evidence that the following things are true:

1)    All our lives are happening at once. There is so much evidence that we live multiple lives that the concept of reincarnation cannot be denied by anyone who has examined the evidence, but rather than progressing from past to future, apparently all our lives are happening at the same time. Very rarely there will be moments of actual bleed-through from one of our lives to another. A very advanced being has suggested that the easiest way for us to understand reincarnation would be to imagine it as a bucket from which each lifetime is dipped and back into which each lifetime is poured.

2)    Future-life progression is as easy as is past-life regression. Dr. Brian Weiss pioneered techniques for hypnotically regressing people with phobias and other psychological problems to past lives in which some trauma had occurred, and he discovered that simply reliving that trauma could serve to cure the present-life psychological issue. Having been cured of a fear of heights this way, I can personally attest that his technique works well. Dr. Weiss then found that if there was no obvious source of problems in a past life, he could just as easily progress people under hypnosis to a future lifetime, and there he often found the causative trauma!

3)    History apparently is happening all at once. This is a natural corollary of the two previous points, and since time is not real it is probably inevitable. It may well be that all the aspects of what we think of as linear history actually are occurring simultaneously and intimately affecting one another.

So reality is not just stranger than we have been imagining it to be, but it is stranger than we can imagine it to be! Next week I will give you a boggling insight into what these facts about time might mean.